1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to user interface software and, more particularly, to a method, computer program product and computer system for processing whitespace in user input character strings.
2. Related Art
In today's global economy, computer software is designed, developed and marketed to meet the demands of an international customer base Software solutions (whether client-server or web-based) must be capable of providing a consistent and functional user interface across a wide range of languages.
However, the production of internationalized software is not without its challenges. For example, users, in general, enter information in different and inconsistent ways. Developing a ‘write once, run everywhere’ solution that processes multi-lingual information in a similar way, regardless of language or platform has certain disadvantages.
For example, in a conventional web-based environment, a web-form may be used to implement a “Security question—Security answer” scenario. The web-form is used to prompt a user to submit information at one time and to then prompt that user to re-submit the same information at a later time as a means of identification.
Referring to FIG. 1, at step 100, a user wishes to register for a service of an organization and is presented with a web-form and asked to enter certain information. At step 110 and as part of this registration information, the user enters an information pair known as a “Security question—Security answer” set. For example, the security question could be: “What are the names of your cats?”. The security answer might be: “Kuching and Mao Mao”.
At step 120, this information pair is stored in a database for later identity verification in case the user loses a password.
At step 130, and at some point in time after registration, the user may mislay a password and consequently request a new one. At step 140, a short web-form is presented with the security question from the database. The user is prompted to enter the answer supplied previously at step 110. At step 150, the software detects that the entered answer is semantically correct, and the characters are in the same order, but the nature of the whitespace surrounding the glyphs (that is, the visual characters) is different. This typically occurs because the user is careless with the character input and adds or omits whitespace characters before and/or after the glyphs. Accordingly, at step 160, the software incorrectly refuses the request for a new password. Thus the result may be an irritated user and a potential loss of business for the organization.
Therefore, a need exists to provide processing of whitespace in multi-lingual user input that overcomes or substantially ameliorates one or more disadvantages and shortcomings of existing arrangements.